The delicate
snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to
escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings
with it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as we
catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards,
almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that may
well be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley.
The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we
think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and
composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that
impression which those about him received from him.
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